Building a WordPress website shouldn’t feel like solving a puzzle.
One of the secrets is choosing a simple theme that makes design feel more effortless. This type of theme is great because it lets you create beautiful sites without drowning in complex settings.
For this roundup, we’ve tested dozens of WordPress themes to find simple ones that just work, such as SeedProd, Divi, Neve, and others.
These themes are perfect for either launching your first blog or building a professional business site. They’re clean, fast, and won’t overwhelm you with endless customization options. ✨
In this guide, we’ll show you the best simple WordPress themes you should try.

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Top 3 Simple WordPress Themes at a Glance
Short on time? No worries! Here’s a quick overview of the best simple WordPress themes for your needs:
🥇 First choice | 🥈 Second choice | 🥉 Third choice |
SeedProd | Elegant Themes Divi | ThemeIsle Neve |
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Popularity: 1 million+ active installs | Popularity: 2M+ active installs | Popularity: 300,000+ active installs |
Rating: 4,500+ 5-star reviews on WordPress.org | Rating: 20,000+ reviews on Trustpilot | Rating: 1,000+ 5-star reviews on WordPress.org |
350+ site kits and starter templates | 300+ website and page templates | 100+ starter sites and templates |
90+ premium page blocks | Built-in website elements | Ready-made block patterns |
Built-in page, website, and Theme builder | Works with Divi Builder and other page builders | Compatible with popular page builders |
No-code WooCommerce builder | Seamless WooCommerce integration | Supports eCommerce plugins out of the box |
Read more » | Read more | Read more » |
How We Test And Review Simple WordPress Themes
After testing lots of WordPress themes, we finally cracked the code on what makes a theme truly “simple.” Here’s the story behind our testing process:
- Quick Setup Process – During testing, we learned that truly simple themes get you up and running in 5 minutes or less. The best ones didn’t have complex setup guides.
- Clean Interface – We checked how clean the theme’s dashboard is. When we could make basic changes without checking documentation, we knew we found a good one.
- Essential Features Only – We looked for simple themes that just nailed the basics – easy header editing, normal widget areas, and mobile-responsive design. Nothing fancy, just functional.
- Basic Customization – The best simple themes aren’t packed with endless options. Instead, they give you just what you need. This way, you can change colors, fonts, and layouts without getting a headache.
- Performance Speed – We also ran speed tests on our selected simple themes and they consistently load faster. It happens because there’s no flashy animation and bulky features that can bog down your WordPress site.
Every theme in our list passed these real-world tests – we know they work because we built actual sites with them. 👨🎨
Why Trust WPBeginner?
Our team has spent 16+ years building and maintaining WordPress sites, and we’ve seen how complicated themes often cause more problems than they solve.
When reviewing simple themes, we focus on real-world setup time, dashboard clarity, and essential features. Each theme in this list has been personally tested – from initial installation to full site launch.
Want to see our complete testing process? Check out our editorial standards.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the best simple WordPress themes. This list contains both free and paid WordPress themes and all of them are fully mobile responsive.
1. SeedProd

SeedProd is a popular website and landing page builder for WordPress. It’s not a typical theme but, actually, a plugin that lets you make a simple website design from scratch without writing or editing code.
We personally use SeedProd to build some of our business sites and love how their AI website builder speeds things up. It helps you add everything, be it text, images, or videos, in just a few clicks.
Want to learn more? Feel free to check out our detailed SeedProd review!
SeedProd offers dozens of ready-made website and page templates. Plus, it has a drag-and-drop builder you can use to completely customize them.
From our experience, we can say these features are real time-saver. Instead of manual setup, you can get your website up and running with just a few clicks.
Moreover, we also appreciate that it seamlessly works with WooCommerce, making it easy to add an online store to your site. So basically, SeedProd is a 1-stop solution for you to get started in just a few clicks.
For more details, you can see our guide on how to create a custom theme.
2. Divi

Divi is a powerful and simple premium WordPress theme for all kinds of websites and comes with hundreds of pre-designed page templates you can use.
After thorough testing, we can say Divi truly shines as a simple theme. It keeps things straightforward with an AI builder that turns your ideas into reality – no complicated settings or coding needed.
For a full look at its features, don’t miss our Divi review!
We love that Divi has a distraction-free design specifically for bloggers and writers. You can create a story with visuals using the simple drag-and-drop builder.
Plus, Divi allows you to fully customize each element on your website through the front-end editor. You don’t need to know any HTML or CSS code. It comes with tons of pre-built content elements to make your work easier than ever.
3. Neve

Neve is a simple, fast, and flexible WordPress blog theme. This theme comes with a navigation menu at the top alongside the search bar. It also has built-in social sharing buttons, a featured content slider, and an about us section on the homepage.
Through our hands-on testing, we can say it’s easy to customize and works seamlessly with the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg editor).
Plus, we love that it’s WooCommerce-ready for creating storefronts. Above all, Neve’s starter sites library can help you get your site up and running quickly.
4. OceanWP

OceanWP is an elegant and simple WordPress theme designed specifically for blogs, magazines, restaurants, online stores, and fitness websites. We’re impressed with its multiple layouts for your blog, powerful premium extensions, several custom widgets, and various post formats.
This simple WordPress theme supports a custom logo, navigation menus, and social buttons. Plus, we learned that it’s WooCommerce-ready, so you can easily add an online store to your WordPress site.
5. Ultra

Ultra is a simple WordPress theme designed specifically to create any type of website. During setup, we found that it features multiple built-in layouts, flexible addons, smart layout options, custom fonts, and unlimited colors.
Ultra’s layouts will have built-in sections like portfolio, services, team members, and partners. We also appreciate that it supports section-based scrolling, mega menus, archive layouts, and animated color
6. True North

True North is a flexible and simple WordPress theme with a beautiful design. It features a grid layout on the home page with a beautiful display of images. It has multiple layout choices and a built-in portfolio section.
It also supports custom background and header and has several custom widgets for social media and content discovery features.
7. Essence Pro

Essence is a simple and clutter-free WordPress theme for health, wellness, and lifestyle niches. It’s built on the Genesis Framework, a highly reliable and fast-loading theme.
Essence Pro has a widget-ready homepage layout where you can drag-and-drop widgets to build your homepage. It’s straightforward to use and very easy to set up.
8. Astra

Astra is a colorful yet simple WordPress theme with multiple ready-made websites for lifestyle, fitness, food, and personal websites. It comes with multiple page layouts, several custom widgets, and unlimited color options. It’s easy to set up and can be customized using the live theme customizer.
This user-friendly theme is fully compatible with popular drag-and-drop page builder plugins such as Elementor. This means you can create attractive pages using a simple interface. Astra is fully optimized for speed and performance.
9. Didi

Didi is an excellent example of a clean WordPress theme with an elegant and minimalist design. This beautiful theme comes with multiple homepage layouts, page templates, widget areas, and more. All these options are available under the live customizer for easier setup.
Didi also includes full support for page builders, WooCommerce, and multilingual websites and can be easily translated. The fast setup and simple design will help you get started with minimum effort.
10. Infinity Pro

Infinity Pro is a simple and robust WordPress theme for businesses, portfolio sites, freelancers, and personal websites. It’s compatible with all popular WordPress plugins, so you can easily add features like a contact form to your site.
It has a fully widgetized homepage, a custom landing page, and a multi-column layout template. The theme setup is straightforward with the help of the live theme customizer and does not take much time.
11. Hestia

Hestia is a free multi-purpose WordPress theme. During testing, we found that it has a companion plugin that adds testimonials, services, and a homepage section to your website.
From our experience, Hestia is easy to set up using the live theme customizer. It’s compatible with popular free page builder plugins and supports WooCommerce to create an online shop.
We also like that Hestia uses a responsive design and is retina-ready. This means your site will offer a great user experience on even the most modern mobile devices.
12. Magazine

Magazine is a WordPress theme for bloggers looking for a simple magazine-style design and powerful features. It includes a built-in featured content slider with multiple styles. The theme has dozens of built-in layouts to get started.
The Magazine theme also has several blog layouts, multiple page templates, and multiple homepage layouts. All the theme options can be set up using the live theme customizer.
13. Corner

Corner is a simple WordPress theme for personal websites, blogs, and portfolio websites. It has a built-in section for your portfolio, and it can also be used as a personal website.
Corner supports unlimited color variations and comes with tons of customization options. Plus, it’s SEO-friendly to help your site rank well in Google and other search engines.
14. Gema

Gema is a minimalist WordPress theme suitable for blogging and magazine websites. It features a beautiful layout with large images, beautiful typography, a custom logo option, and unique menu styles.
It’s easy to use, with all theme options neatly organized under the theme customizer. Most theme settings work straight out of the box.
15. Tusant

Tusant is a stunningly beautiful and simple WordPress blog theme built specifically for podcasts, music streaming, and video-based sites. It’s designed to help you create engaging content using images and videos.
Tusant uses beautiful animations with multiple page layouts and custom content discovery widgets. It also has a full-width custom background image and supports audio and video sources.
16. Kadence

Kadence is a free responsive WordPress theme for bloggers and writers. It features beautiful typography and has an elegant layout. This means it looks great on all devices.
The theme has starter templates with beautiful colors and fonts. It’s a good option for travel bloggers, writers, authors, and any type of WordPress blog.
17. Presence

Presence is a great choice for a simple WordPress business theme. It’s packed with features to easily build any kind of business website. Particularly, it’s perfect for real estate, music bands, hotels, web designers, and other service providers.
It includes multiple demo websites that you can easily import and then just replace the content with your own to create your website instantly.
18. Roxima

Roxima is a gorgeous WordPress theme for small businesses, blogs, and portfolio websites. The theme has a full-width layout that adjusts automatically to any screen size.
It comes with an easy-to-set-up drag-and-drop homepage builder. It has custom content modules with multiple columns and layout variations for you to choose from.
19. Breakthrough

Breakthrough is a simple, sleek, and modern WordPress theme for bloggers, advertisers, and marketing agencies with the main focus on beautiful typography and gorgeous image display.
It requires very little time to set up, so you can quickly start creating amazing content on your blog. Breakthrough is a great option for advertising or marketing agencies.
20. Sydney Pro

Sydney Pro is a simple WordPress theme for business websites. It has a built-in portfolio and services section, beautiful image galleries, and a slider for your homepage.
Among other features, it has featured sections, pricing tables, a custom background, and many flexible customization options.
21. Elegant

Elegant is a WordPress blog and portfolio theme. It features a beautiful layout with the logo and navigation menu on top of a social menu. It has multiple layout options, including a grid layout.
It has a built-in portfolio content type, several custom widgets, multiple color schemes, and an easy-to-use theme options panel.
22. Coastline

Coastline is a simple WordPress photography and portfolio theme with a beautiful column grid layout. It includes additional layout choices that you can use with several custom widgets, page templates, and a sidebar navigation menu.
It has a portfolio content post type to design your portfolio. Coastline supports Jetpack to add powerful features to your website.
23. Paperbag

Paperbag is a simple WordPress blog theme. It ships with color and typography schemes and different layout styles. There are several custom widgets inside that you can use for social media integration and content discovery features.
It has a built-in featured content carousel for the homepage. All the theme options can be set up using the live theme customizer, which has lots of flexible options.
24. Float

Float is a simple and stylish WordPress blog theme with great features. Inside, you will find several layout choices, a homepage slider, Google Fonts integration, social share options, and parallax scrolling effects.
It has a refreshing design that is fully customizable using the theme customizer. It also supports WooCommerce straight out of the box.
25. Monochrome Pro

Monochrome Pro is a multipurpose WordPress theme that is suitable for almost any kind of WordPress site. Designed to be flexible, it includes lots of customization options, multiple custom widgets, and a black-and-white homepage style.
It can be easily used for a magazine website or as a one-page theme. Inside, you will find a portfolio section, eCommerce support, and more.
26. Maxwell

Maxwell is a simplistic free WordPress theme for magazines and blogs. Designed to showcase your content beautifully, Maxwell uses featured images, custom excerpts, and beautiful typography to create an engaging experience for your users.
It has a built-in featured content slider and two navigation menus. All the theme options can be easily set up using the live customizer.
27. Carbone

Carbone is a beautiful and simple WordPress restaurant theme with a built-in menu management system. It also has a testimonials section where you can share glowing reviews left by your customers and a photo gallery to showcase your most popular dishes.
Carbone features a truly unique layout and offers multiple color schemes and layout choices.
28. Baskerville

Baskerville is another free WordPress theme with a beautiful layout and some pretty neat features. It features a full-width header image and masonry layout for the homepage.
Baskerville uses beautiful thumbnails for your videos, text, and other post formats.
29. Responz

Responz is a simple WordPress theme designed for news and editorial blogs. It has multiple color schemes, a featured posts section, two navigation menus, ad spaces, a carousel slider, and multiple sidebars.
It’s easy to set up. All the theme options can be managed from the live WordPress customizer.
30. Felt

Felt is a stylish WordPress blog theme with a beautiful design. It makes a great option for lifestyle and fashion bloggers. The homepage features a full-width header with an intro section, followed by your most important content.
The theme has several layout options and templates for your blog and for different pages. You will also get several custom widgets for easy social media integration and content discovery features.
31. Futurio

Futurio is an incredibly fast and lightweight theme. Unlike most themes, it does not display your featured images on the front page, which makes your homepage load much faster.
It’s designed for bloggers and is a great choice for long-form content. Futurio supports a custom logo, custom header, welcome message, and background. Plus, it comes with homepage blurbs to display featured content beautifully.
32. Peak

Peak is a modern WordPress blog theme for portfolios, photographers, and personal blogs.
It includes several layouts and color schemes, a built-in slider, and a masonry-style layout. Peak also supports a mega menu and is eCommerce-ready to create an online store.
33. Mesmerize

Mesmerize is a free WordPress theme for bloggers, magazines, and photography websites. It comes with a custom header background, WooCommerce support, homepage sections, and a navigation menu on top.
The theme setup is quick, letting you get a professional-looking website up and running fast.
34. Nozama

Nozama is an Amazon-inspired WordPress theme with a simple and stylish look. It focuses on beautiful typography and a gorgeous display of images to make your content more engaging.
Nozama comes with a header category menu, featured categories section, multiple layout options, and infinite scroll. It’s easy to set up and includes a getting started page to help you.
35. OnePress

OnePress is a free WordPress theme with a beautiful and stylish look. The homepage layout uses a stylish parallax effect and featured content blocks and is WooCommerce-ready.
OnePress features beautiful typography and has call-to-action buttons on the homepage. It uses Bootstrap 4, which is a framework for developing responsive websites that look great on all devices.
36. Altitude Pro

Altitude Pro is a WordPress blogging and digital marketing theme with a professional design. The most notable features of the theme are its crisp typography and beautiful display of images.
It has a widgetized homepage layout that is quick and easy to set up. It has multiple page templates, a custom header, and full WooCommerce support.
37. Indigo

Indigo is the perfect WordPress multipurpose theme for selling arts and crafts. It’s compatible with WooCommerce and features several gorgeous homepage layouts to showcase your content and products.
The theme has a modern, clean design with several variants you can use. For instance, you can choose to have a sidebar or a full-width page.
38. Consulting

Consulting is a free and multipurpose WordPress theme for bloggers. it has three custom featured sections on the homepage. Consulting supports parallax slider, custom colors, and multiple page templates, including a custom archives page.
Designed to instantly set up a professional-looking blog, Consulting is quick and easy to set up and looks stunning even on smaller screens.
39. Benson

Benson is another elegant and simple WordPress blog theme for photographers. It offers large, full-width, and list layouts for your photos. Inside, you will find custom widgets for an author bio, social media buttons, content discovery features, a video slideshow, and multiple image layouts.
Benson supports unlimited colors, left or right sidebar, custom logo, header, and background. It’s easy to set up using the live theme customizer and will help you quickly start your blog.
40. Landing

Landing is a beautiful WordPress multipurpose theme built specifically to create simple websites. It features beautiful typography, a custom background, and pre-built layouts that look great on all devices and screen sizes.
It supports the Themify drag-and-drop builder to create pages and add features to your website. Landing has custom header templates, a portfolio post type, an event post type, and full compatibility with WooCommerce and popular WooCommerce plugins.
41. Allegiant

Allegiant is a multi-purpose WordPress theme that can be adapted for eCommerce, business, magazines, or photography websites. It comes with flexible options that allow you to choose your layout.
It includes unlimited color choices, custom widgets, Google Fonts, and full WooCommerce support. It’s designed to work out of the box with minimum effort, which makes it easy to use.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress simple theme for your website. You may also want to see our other WordPress guides for your business and professional websites.
Further Reading: Best WordPress Guides for Simple Websites
✋ Building a simple website doesn’t stop at choosing a theme. Here are more guides to help you create the perfect WordPress site:
- Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses
- Best Business Phone Services for Small Businesses
- How to Code a Website (Complete Beginner’s Guide)
- Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
- Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins Compared
- How to Start a Video Blog (Vlog) And Make Money
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Olaf
The word *simple* is key here. Many people seek simplicity, elegance, and a minimalist website design. This is especially great for personal portfolios, where the focus is on sharing information about oneself, not on technical features that can be toggled on or off. This is an excellent list. I’ve had the pleasure of working on or developing websites using many of these templates. I won’t specify which templates are great because there are truly a lot of them on this list. These are templates that have been tested over the years and are backed by very skilled developers. You have a great eye for selecting templates.
Jiří Vaněk
Astra and OceanWP are some of my favorite themes. I’ve built several websites using Astra. It’s a beautiful, simple theme that works perfectly and has very well-optimized code for both SEO and site speed. The same goes for OceanWP. These two themes from the list in the article are ones I could confidently recommend to anyone, as they won’t go wrong with them. Their support is also excellent. I’m sure the other themes are great too, but for me, the clear winners from the entire list are these two.
Zana
Thank you for the wealth of info you are sharing. A little overwhelmed, but learning a lot. I’m looking for a theme where I can write content and include a recipe with a picture and basic nutritional info. Not every post will have a recipe, but I need a theme where I can add a recipe and picture without using another theme.
Just learning about Wordpress. I know I will need a recipe plugin. Confused how the plugin will work with the theme.
Thank you.
WPBeginner Support
You may want to take a look at our article covering adding recipes here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-add-recipes-in-wordpress-with-seo-friendly-formatting/
Admin
Kim Thornley
I have loked and can’t find a wordpress theme that suits what I what my site to become.
It is a site for music and photographs, so it must be able to have photograph galleries, mp3 streaming, download facilities for various formats of music and pictures plus the usual contact stuff.
In my head, the home page is a single background colour (which matches the logo/header). Each page is colour themed (ie: a different colour scheme for each band/picture gallery).
The current themes I have tried, do not fulfill my requirements and I am getting very frustrated. Each time I try to modify a theme that looked promising, it does not let me accomplish what I consider to be a simple alteration.
I want a template that will allow me to do what I have described briefly.
Any suggestions?
WPBeginner Support
For creating your own specific setup for a design you would want to take a look into page builders: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/best-drag-and-drop-page-builders-for-wordpress/
Admin
James Luckern
Do a search for those goals in the add new plugin. All features that can be added to any theme. Most are added to page using short code. Youtube has a ton of tutorials
Karyn Ingold
What would be your suggestion for a social surfing club. Need gallery, calendar, monthly update, membership form, link to FB and contact infor.
Linda
I am going to have an informative e-commerce site with a limited number of products, lots of educational material. I do not want site that opens to a picture as the main page. Are there Wordpress themes that don’t have that? I find it ridiculous to want info and be forced to look at some picture, then click again to find what I want. Thanks.
WPBeginner Support
Hi Linda,
The large header images are shown in theme demos just to illustrate the feature. Most themes have option to not show an image in the header.
Admin
Reg
Thank you for this. Programmers these days trying to push the boundaries catering for everyone in the process catering for no one.
Dina
I have found a few I like – but when I go to my wordpress.org bluehosted site – I can’t figure out how to pull them up – help please!
WPBeginner Support
Hi Dina,
Please see our guide on how to install a WordPress theme for detailed instructions.
Admin
Rushikesh Thawale
Hello,
I need a free (simple) WordPress theme which will show posts side by side in categories. Which one would you prefer?
David Pratt
I am trying to resurrect an old copy of Thesis and finding it difficult to understand. Thesis support doesn’t reply. Since I am a very beginner would you advise me to dump Thesis, take up a Wordpress theme and start over? My only option is to find some helpful site, such as wpbeginner.com, that could help me understand Thesis and sort specific issues I have. Recommendations would be valuable.
Thanks
WPBeginner Support
Hi David,
The best way to learn the usage of a theme or framework is through official documentation. If you find the support inadequate, then you may want to try your hands on some other product that has more extensive documentation or better support options.
Admin
Dave
I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am looking for a very simple theme, where the featured image is in the top left corner of the page and text wrapped.
Please note that I know how to do this in design view, per picture. But hoping for a theme tnat does it automatically. For an example please see Ready Review by themeisle, but I am looking for a simpler one, with just the picture thing going on.
Soumik Sadman Anwar
Liked the “Writee” theme, perfect for me. Thanks WPBeginner.